DISCLAIMER: I am a NOOB, so please keep in mind that anything I say may be completely stupid.
OK, I am not qualified to offer opinions on the training that other divers have had, because I am not familiar with whatever it was that they did. I can only speak about how I was trained, since I DO know about that.
The people who did my OW training were serious about it... they are safety oriented cave divers, each and every one of them... and you aren't getting your c-card from them unless you actually know how to dive when you get done.
There were 11 in my class, and only 5 of the people that I started with actually received their c-cards together. One quit flat out because it turned out to be a lot more work than she was willing to do (or so she told me as she was leaving), three didn't make it past the pool and the other two didn't make it through open water.
All of those that didn't make it through were offered the chance to work on their problem areas in future pool and OW sessions...
My instructors were insistent that not only did we need to do all of the skills, we needed to do them repeatedly and we needed to do them right. We weren't sitting on our knees at the bottom of the pool clearing our masks once and then we were done... we were put through our paces but good. If you didn't do it perfectly, repeatedly, you did it again... and again...
We did our open water in a quarry, and the visibility was bad on the first day and literally 1 foot on the second day... when we went down to do our skills on the second day we went down with the instructor one at a time and he was literally 6 inches away the whole time just to see us... we were down 25 feet and it was nearly pitch black, the water was cold and thick... and it was (to say the least) challenging. Our "tours" were basically traveling along the quarry wall where the vis was a whopping 3 feet in the sunshine...
During our surface intervals, we practiced the complete skill-sets of everything that could be done on the surface.
I have since talked to a lot of divers about their training, and I am coming to find out that my classes were probably a lot better than what some people get.
You can't train for every type of diving in basic OW, I suppose, unless you happen to have access to both fresh and salt water diving... so if I had a deficiency in my training it was in the fact I had no experience working from a boat... still, my instructors had taught us how to pack our boat bags so we would put the stuff we needed to put on first (wetsuit, boots, etc) on top, and how to keep our areas clean and all our stuff organized and out of everybody else's way... so that was good.
When I was graduated, I was 100 percent ready to dive in the conditions that I trained in. I recently did my first open ocean stuff at Kona, and I took my AOW training there because I was not as familiar with ocean diving and boat diving as I needed to be, so I took more instruction the AOW, doing deep, boat, night, buoyancy and navigation... all of which are basic skills I felt I needed more work on...